A Third of Americans Can’t Name the Three Branches of Government

In early August 2026, interviewers asked 1,034 American adults a question with no answer list to lean on: name the three branches of government. Sixty-five percent produced the executive, legislative, and judicial branches from memory, essentially unchanged from the two prior years. The other 35 percent could not, including 16 percent who could not name a single branch.

The rest of the questionnaire, the 2026 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, applies the same pressure throughout: no multiple choice, just recall. Asked what rights the First Amendment protects, 73 percent named freedom of speech. Fewer than half named freedom of religion, at 43 percent. Fewer than a third named freedom of assembly or freedom of the press. Just 12 percent named the right to petition the government. Nine percent named all five protections. Twenty-four percent named none.

A Quarter Reach for the Wrong Amendment

One answer kept surfacing where it does not belong. Twenty-five percent of respondents volunteered the right to bear arms when asked about the First Amendment, though that right sits in the Second. The survey team counts the mistake precisely because it is so telling: the right Americans can most easily call to mind is not in the amendment they were being asked about.

“Ignorance is costly,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director emerita of the center. “You can’t protect and cherish rights that you don’t know you have.”

Some of the gap is methodological. Producing an answer from memory is harder than recognizing one on a list. When Pew Research Center quizzed 5,115 adults in 2023 with structured options, 57 percent could identify one First Amendment right, while 75 percent knew the length of a Supreme Court appointment. Drop the list and recall thins out, which is one reason different surveys put different numbers on the same national shortfall. The pattern itself, though, is consistent across pollsters: in a 2018 survey built from citizenship-test questions, only 36 percent of American adults passed a multiple-choice version of the test, and only 13 percent knew the Constitution was written on September 17, 1787.

One number deserves restraint. The 2026 survey ran on the SSRS Opinion Panel Omnibus, while the 2024 and 2025 editions ran on panels the center maintains itself. The topline warns that year-to-year differences may reflect the change of panel as much as any real shift in public knowledge. The dip in naming freedom of speech, 73 percent against 79 percent last year, is statistically significant. Most of the other trend lines are descriptive.

Structure Is Easier Than Rights

On the mechanics of government, the picture brightens. Eighty-three percent know Congress can override a presidential veto with a two-thirds vote in each chamber. Sixty-nine percent know a 5-4 Supreme Court decision is the law and needs to be followed. But almost one in five, 18 percent, say a 5-4 ruling is sent back to Congress for reconsideration, up significantly from 13 percent in 2024, the last time the question was asked.

Sixty percent know the Supreme Court carries the final responsibility for deciding whether a presidential action is constitutional when the president and the court disagree. Seventeen percent say that responsibility lies with Congress, 4 percent with the president, and 19 percent are not sure. The Tenth Amendment divides the country in half: 50 percent correctly say powers not granted to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people, 13 percent believe the reverse, and 37 percent are not sure.

Rights Follow Persons, Not Passports

Two items carry extra weight this year because courts are actively weighing the questions behind them. Fifty-six percent of adults say it is inaccurate to claim that people who are in the country illegally have no rights under the Constitution. The law is on their side. The Supreme Court said in 1886 that the Fourteenth Amendment “is not confined to the protection of citizens” and that its guarantees are universal for all persons within the territorial jurisdiction, whatever their nationality, reasoning the Court cited decades later when it held, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, that the amendment’s opening sentence, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens,” reaches children born here to parents who themselves are not citizens.

Seventy-six percent of respondents correctly said that a child born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction is a citizen even if neither parent is. The survey was fielded while courts continue to contest the meaning of that provision.

Why Recall Matters

Political scientists treat this kind of knowledge as more than trivia. A widely cited 2001 review in the Annual Review of Political Science found that levels of political knowledge shape acceptance of democratic principles, positions on specific issues, and political participation. The same review delivered a colder finding: decades of expanding formal education barely moved the numbers, and college graduates today know no more about politics than high school graduates did in 1950. Classroom civics instruction, it noted, can raise knowledge, but schooling alone has not closed the gap.

The pipeline is not obviously filling it either. The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress recorded the first score decline in eighth-grade civics since the assessment began in 1998, with only 22 percent of eighth-graders at or above the proficient level and 31 percent below basic.

“This year’s findings indicate there is still work to be done in strengthening the citizenry’s knowledge of the U.S. Constitution,” said R. Lance Holbert, director of the center’s Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics. “An understanding of our nation’s founding documents remains paramount for the long-term health of the nation’s democracy.”

The survey will be run again next year, same open-ended questions, same demand for unaided answers. For now the most recalled right in the Bill of Rights is one the First Amendment does not contain, and the most telling figure may be the 24 percent who, asked about the amendment that begins the Bill of Rights, could name nothing at all.

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